This goes for all kinds of consumption: eating (especially large meals at restaurants where you don’t usually get to pick your portion), drinking (coffee, alcohol, milkshakes or any “vice” drinks), shopping (for clothes, shoes, and even more “educational” items like books, CDs or toys for the twins). You get to decide for yourself what “enough” is. But stopping when you’ve had enough allows you to enjoy what you have and avoid all kinds of bloat and clutter — such as the piles of clothes and toys and papers I saw in The Queen of Versailles.

Now, the Queen and her family were very, very rich. And then the market crashed and they (more…)

I’ve loved George Saunders ever since I read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and when I told him (at his Politics and Prose reading last night), he said that I must have been about four when I read it. “Between 14 and 24,” I said — not trying to be cagey about my age but because I was so happy to be talking with him that I got a little math-addled. (I was much closer to 24.)

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So after that last post you might be expecting something big and revolutionary. I kind of am too … but the more I think about it the more intimidating the prospect becomes and the less inclined I am to write anything at all. So instead I’m going to write about what’s on my mind and if it turns into something counter-cultural and grand, great. But today, at least, I don’t think it will. What’s on my mind is pee.

The twins — not yet two — seem to want to start potty training. Although “training” is hardly the right word for it. They like to (more…)

During yesterday’s visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library (after seeing “Very Like a Whale,” an exhibit that showcased, among other things, a narwhal tooth, an enormous chained book and an etching of a saint saying mass on top of a whale), I learned that if I were living in Tudor England, today would be Plough Monday. (Perhaps it still is.) On Plough Monday you put the revels of Christmas and New Year’s Day and Twelfth Night behind you and set your hand to the plow. After at least twelve days of lying fallow, it’s time for me to do the same.

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A bit about me …

I'm Randon Billings Noble, an essayist and book reviewer, who is also the mother of now three-and-a-half year old twins. I don't post here as much as I used to, but you can read my published writing and hear my writing news by clicking the link immediately below (which will take you to my writing website, randonbillingsnoble.com). Thanks!

I’m thrilled to announce that my lyric essay chapbook Devotional is out from Red Bird Chapbooks! This brilliantly decorated star fold book opens to expose a simple beauty and the experience of longing in a series of personal devotions, its brevity and contemplative prose evocative of a medieval Book of Hours. Each section of Devotional calls […]

I’m pleased to announce that my author talk, “The Sparkling Future, the Eternal Present,” is up at Superstition Review’s blog. In it I read an excerpt from my essay “The Sparkling Future” and discuss the power of seduction, the price of betrayal, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, break-ups, beheadings, and what it’s like — as an essayist […]

It begins with a quote from the Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet — “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.” — and continues in 69 short numbered sections. You can find it here: “69 […]

I’m pleased to announce that I have two “Required Reading” columns in Creative Nonfiction: “A Story We Tell Ourselves and Others,” a review essay, Required Reading, Creative Nonfiction (May 2016) Here’s an excerpt: It’s often said that no one really knows what goes on inside a marriage except for the people who are in it—and I would […]